IBM continues investment in African technology with 14 TFLOPS BG

ITWeb reported yesterday on IBM’s continuing investment in advanced technology supporting the development of sub-Saharan Africa. You can read a little background on this from insideHPC coverage back in June.

IBM’s donation of the $1.6 million supercomputer, Blue Gene/P, is in response to the growing innovation opportunities on the African continent.

While there is a business objective, IBM VP of systems research Mark Dean says: “Sub-Saharan Africa has many needs and we at IBM wanted to make a difference. Blue Gene will give the sub-continent an opportunity to grow.”

…The machine was unveiled on Monday by deputy science and technology minister Derek Hanekom. “The aim of the donation is to enable Sub-Saharan Africa to extend its knowledge, skills base and research in science and technology,” adds Dean.

Despite being one of two of the most powerful machines on the African continent, the CSIR’s Blue Gene is unlikely to make the Top 500 list just yet. The lowest listed machine is a Fujitsu-Siemens supercomputer, running at 18.81 teraflops

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

In this podcast, Terri Quinn from LLNL provides an update on Hardware and Integration (HI) at the Exascale Computing Project. "The US Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories will acquire, install, and operate the nation’s first exascale-class systems. ECP is responsible for assisting with applications and software and accelerating the research and development of critical commercial exascale system hardware. ECP’s Hardware and Integration research focus area (HI), was created to help the laboratories and the ECP teams achieve success through mutually beneficial collaborations." [Read More...]

White Papers

Artificial intelligence has already had a profound effect on many industries. But for the healthcare sector, this collection of technologies is proving to be nothing short of transformative. Download the new report from HPE that explores how tools like GPUs and deep learning platforms are changing and progressing healthcare.